IBM Watson Assistant Reviews

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IBM Watson Assistant

4.3

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IBM Watson Assistant is a tool that add a natural language interface to an application to automate interactions with end users, common applications include virtual agents and chat bots that can integrate and communicate on any channel or device.

What do you like best?

The obvious one is IBM's AI/ML expertise, but that's a given with any Watson product. So, more specifically, I have three key things that I love about Watson Assistant:

1. Continual product expansion/improvement: I've been using Watson Assistant for about 18 months, and I've watched a steady stream of regular platform updates -- each of which brings useful new features or further simplifies the development experience. It's clear that IBM has embraced an ongoing iterative product improvement approach, and I always look forward to every new update.

2. Amazing design and UI: Before I got started, I had assumed that using a sophisticated AI platform would be intimidatingly complex. I was surprised (and delighted) when I saw that Watson Assistant had a simple and straightforward development interface, and an astoundingly good one at that. They've made it so you can do just about everything right in your browser, so it's easy to jump in and start building.

3. The API: The Watson Assistant API is extremely powerful, and opens up ways of working with data that can take your bot project to the next level. Beyond the API itself is its solid documentation with helpful examples, and a consistency across the methods that makes everything feel familiar after using it for just a little while.

What do you dislike?

Honestly, very little. There's really nothing to complain about regarding the Assistant platform itself. I could list some "nice to haves" (e.g. more integration with other Watson services like Tone Analyzer, some housekeeping/maintenance features related to intents and entities) but that's just me wanting more cool stuff. Can't even complain about the pricing, which is amazingly fair.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's free to try, so there's no reason not to jump in and give it a shot. Everything is incredibly well-documented, so if you run into any issues you're usually just a Google search away from quickly figuring out what to do. Line up the right people to work on your bot project: you'll want folks who have a strong command of the language that your bot operates in, as well as some technical acumen. The core product truly is simple to use, but building out more complex dialog will be easier for folks who have even basic development experience (which can help with concepts like branching, logic, and variables). For less complex dialog, literally anyone can be trained to manage a Watson Assistant bot, for sure.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

At Humana, we used Watson Assistant to serve as a Tier 0 support agent during our Workday rollout. The change management effort tied to moving 40,000+ people to a new HR system was massive, and Watson was a critical component in supporting everyone through the change. In the first two weeks after going live with Workday, our Watson Assistant bot answered more than 30,000 questions (diverting many support calls from our HR help desk and keeping everyone freed up to support more complex issues). Our use of Watson Assistant was unquestionably a huge part of our success with the Workday rollout.

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What do you like best?

The best for me is the ability of artificial intelligence watson, is how to interact with a human being, gives you advice on improvements in processes such as sales, interactions with your clientele, where you can even have keywords of your company recorded in the AI gives you improvement in your sales strategies on the products you offer.

What do you dislike?

Initially this tool is an artificial intelligence, which is going to complement with other applications that handles IBM, in my particular case say something that fogs up excellent innovation, about the work that makes the artificial intelligence would be something out of base and not very ethical.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Approach the digital age and work with artificial intelligence quickly and easily and at affordable prices, only IBM gives it to you.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

With the artificial intelligence that brings Ibm you can first think about saving money for the company, because you can save on personal hiring, additionally you can create audios of your texts or slogan of your company and integrate them into the conversation with your customers and the bot, is very accurate this new way of working that gives you IBM.

What do you like best?

Maturity of UI and ability to have no-code conversational analysts working within the tool.

The ability to train contextual entities within an intent, to handle unknown examples of a trained entity.

Strong set of documentation underlying the product. Clear and transparently laid out.

Clear ethical framework, and a high level of transparency of how the product works and how both the users, the developers and the AI companies data are all protected. Clear opt-outs which are respected.

Good start for free model and move forward from there.

Ability to handle large intent and data sets.

New searching of nodes, and real time "Try it out" node analysis of failure.

node-red being free and supporting such a wide variety of Watson and other integrations out of the box, and then with community led extensions.

What do you dislike?

Currently incomplete movement from single workspace based, to multiple skills (workspaces) based agents, and from a message based pricing to an active user based pricing model. This is going to get there, but at the the moment the product is somewhere inbetween. I would also like more support for analytics in terms of conversational flow and drop outs, the current strategy of pushing the data out into Watson Studio is incomplete as there aren't easy prebuilt notebooks, or dashboards to build the views you would typically have. So whilst you can do it, there feels like there is a step missing. The "Premium" only feature set is very much disliked as it contains things which feel like it should be in the product. Not giving them for a free tier is fine, but even if you pay for standard level they aren't included, instead reserved for a contact only enterprise tier. It makes it impossible to evaluate them properly and means that they don't get the full workout they need to become proper full features.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Ensure you have a plan for your automated conversational testing and your analytics of successful conversations.

Integrate with your DevOps systems to have daily conversational releases, and automated testing of the affects of each days changes.

Engage good upfront conversational design.

Maintain your training sets and testing sets independently

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

I tried IBM Watson to develop a chatbot. I trained chatbot in IBM Watson and the response is awesome. I gave a demo to one of my friends and his feedback about the chatbot was tremendous.

I used some services like IBM Watson "conversation", "translation" and more, my experience was awesome. I feeling happy to use and explore IBM Watson more and try to utilize this in my future projects

What do you dislike?

If I say about dislike, I didn't find most but I think if you can make documentation more user familiar then it would be great. As I feel currently documentation is prepared in a way that it only targets experienced users who have prior knowledge in programming.

Recommendations to others considering the product

As per my personal experience, I think IBM Watson is doing a great job in Artificial Intelligence. The Application which I build using IBM Watson was awesome and client and user satisfaction was tremendous.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The chatbot application which I developed is basically to enhance user interaction and try to keep engaging user with the application.

Response from Emily Winchurch of IBM Watson Assistant

Thanks for your feedback! As we continue to improve and expand our documentation, we have videos and tutorials on our "How to build a chatbot site" that you might find helpful (https://www.ibm.com/watson/how-to-build-a-chatbot).

What do you like best?

IBM brings you an innovative tool which aims to create virtual agents to ineract with your customer base and be a pleasant and almost human conversation through IBM Watson, you can give ideas, and the application can quickly write and maintain it, this in order to give the feeling to your customers who interact with yourself, amazing

What do you dislike?

IBM thought in all the details of this application, you can integrate it to all IBM applications, you can register for free to perform short tests, and realize the wonders it offers for customer interaction, and the time you can save, in my opinion nothing negative

Recommendations to others considering the product

Perform the free trial and convince yourself that it is a quick solution to your sales process and organize your activities with IBM Watson

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

For me, that is an excellent tool and serves as a great help to orgnize you as a company and even the possibility of having interaction with your customers, instantly fast and reliable with your customers, to save money on human talent and save responsiveness seems good to me, today I find myself using the free registration

What do you like best?

The interface knows automatically when to search the knowledge base for details, when to ask for clarity and in cases where the required details are unavilable in knowledge base it simply diverts the user to the support assistant.

What do you dislike?

Sometimes for a user who traditionally wishes to speak to customer care for help regarding some context interacting with IBM Watson Assistant might seem to be too much time consuming.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

In my team where we manage support teams for problem management regarding a business inteligence tool, the customers frequently try to reach the support team for gettng their task done. For a small team it was initially too hectic to deal with the issues of multiple clients at a time, but after theimplementation of IBM Watson Assistant all the FAQ's and Knowledge Error Database(KEDB) details are covered. It knows automatically when to forward the users to the support human counterparts.

What do you like best?

Watson Assistant is extremely easy to setup and deploy. With a few clicks the watson workspace is live and with a few more clicks you can have a live weblink, slack integration, facebook messenger, etc. The platform makes it very easy to add intents, dialogs, and retrain your model. The biggest learning curve comes from understanding the art of programming a conversation, but once you get that its smooth sailing! One of the biggest things I like about the platform is that you get instant feedback to your model, as every change is live immediately. I also love that it helps recommend intents and help find overlapping intents.

What do you dislike?

My biggest request for improvement is to add an undo button. Although having live changes is great, it's sometimes hard to work with if you make a mistake, break your model, and then have to figure out what you previously did to make it work. I wouild also like the insights page to be improved. We wanted control over history of users and which intents the triggered, as well as a way to capture their feedback, so we implemented a cloudant DB to simply store every conversation. A way to create your own insights dashboard would be very helpful!

Recommendations to others considering the product

Ive looked into other platforms but didn't ever find a need to switch. I think WA is the best choice as it is actively being worked on, with new features getting deployed quarterly.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are leveraging watson assistant to build conversational tools for our clients. We currently are working on a human resources assistant that is integrated with employee benefits and personal information, allowing users to query about their vacation balance, sick balance, and other cool HR insights

What do you like best?

Watson assistant main feature is the easy way you can design de dialogs against the competitors, is the best in this field, also like the way you can manage some flags and important information using the json format of a answer.

What do you dislike?

when you build chatbots you use a lot of examples distributed on diferent Intents, but when you check some conflicts the solution only show 1 vs 1 conflicts, but in the training might exist more than 1 conflictive intentin because the confidence of a test is too low and can be confused, a good solution could be checkin examples across all intents so you can find more conflicts in your training

Recommendations to others considering the product

added in the dislike part

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

whe can build client facing chatbots in less time using really cool features and managing in a smooth way the context for the soluton even when we build async solutions.

What do you like best?

Watson Conversation is one of the best NLU service out there. Watson has a friendly web app that make it easy to start building a virtual agent, although you need some programming and machine learning skills to build a really good one. When data is not good enough (most common case), Watson performs better in intent detection with higher precision and recall scores compared to others providers. I believe this happens because he can do very well the linguistic expansion from a few given examples. You can start using the free tier up to 10,000 calls, which turns the adoption easy and cheap. I also really enjoy the ease of consuming Watson API and integrating into backends and internal systems.

What do you dislike?

Fuzzy matching dont works so well in others languages as it does in english, although its still in beta.

Recommendations to others considering the product

You can find a lot of information on google about how to start with Watson Conversation. Go ahead and try it by yourself.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are primary using Watson Conversation to build virtual agents and chatbots on customers from different industries (from customer service and bots to HR to manufacturing troubleshooting). We use it in different channels: customs web, iOS and android interfaces, Facebook Messenger, customer service and servicedesk tools.

What do you like best?

The Watson Assistant has a very intuitive interface that helps to create a chatbot in a matter of few minutes. It is easy to navigate through the tabs in the dialog itself.

What do you dislike?

The only thing that could be useful for developers is to rewrite the workspace in the dialog, so that the credentials would be the same. In addition, sometimes the response time is long, especially when trying to launch the tool.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

In our team the Watson Assistant was used for different cases, mostly in the customer care sector. It helps to build customized dialog very fast and implement it in the applications, as well as other social medias, in a matter of few minutes.

What do you like best?

With watson assistant you don`t need to have IT to develop a ChatBot for your use case. The business specialists can use the tool to build chatbots and get great results with minumum tech knowledge. It is wirth trying it!

What do you dislike?

You need to build your app for the chatbot - and then you need IT experts. This could be done with some low code platform, but indeed is needed some IT knowledge.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It is worth a try, really. The product is very good for starting in the chatbot world. Start small and grow from that.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The support for our field technical assistants - wich many times need our internal technical team suport for simple questions.

What do you like best?

I really liked how Watson Assistant is structured and the constant evolutions in the tool

What do you dislike?

What I dislike much is that there are several errors in the tool that cause dialog flows to get lost, especially when you delete some child node, it simply causes the "Skip user input and evaluate child nodes" function to exclude in your dialog

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

The easy interface to start building your own virtual assistant and the plenty of code available at the internet to plug it in a bunch of solutions.

What do you dislike?

The lack of real integration workflows within Watson platform itself. There`s a orchestrator needed to enable this feature now, but soon they`ll release new versions with this problem addressed.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

24/7 availability to the customers of an agent that can at least answer and direct questions. But, much more than this, we can offer a bunch os services in the same 24/7 without taking real people to solve those bunch of repetitive tasks, and they can start investing their time doing other stuff.

What do you like best?

We formed strategic partnership with IBM to expedite our roadmaps to introduce analytics and automation in customer service space. Watson enable us introduce chatbot capability within 6 weeks. IBM team supporting PayPal is superb. They come across more as trusted partners rather than vendor/client relationship.

What do you dislike?

Ability to move rich data to cloud is big challenge for Fintech companies. This inflexibility hinders the potential that can be tapped from the rich feature sets of Watson. IBM needs to solve data privacy issues working with regulators.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Providing effortless customer service experience to enable our customer service agents to focus on value add interactions with customers.

What do you like best?

The solution has a great rate of understanding and so the product satisfied manz customers

What do you dislike?

The API to our system was a little complicated.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have a market leading Workspace MAnagement tool including sensors an an Application. It is a great solution for shared offices, when there are more employees than workspaces. You can book workspaces close to team members, book perfect fitting meeting rooms with them and so on. With Watson Conversation, we where able to add a Whatsapp-like Bot you can talk to and reserve all information and bookings.

What do you like best?

Simple to construct and business analysts can support the development of chat flows rather than always needing developers.

What do you dislike?

Would be nice if the business could access the data without needing IT to help extract

Recommendations to others considering the product

Take the time to think through your chatbot flows before building anything

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Providing answers to employees of our clients when they come to us looking for help. Employees were calling Sales,, the client service centers, etc. looking for answers and the chatbot has been able to provide them with the information they need and get them out of other channels.

What do you like best?

Watson Assistant in continuing to grow and improve. The tooling is becoming more intuitive and more best practices are emerging.

What do you dislike?

There are still common problems that don't have workable solutions and the community is still pretty small. Specifically, when creating a voice solution with Watson Assistant, the confidence and recognition can be difficult to improve.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Save voice integration for last.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have implemented a call center chat bot with voice, text message and web chat. We have increased employee engagement and overall satisfaction by automating some of the lower level cognitibve tasks.

What do you like best?

I like the simplicity of setting up a dialog - my background isn't in development or coding and I'm (with some practice) very comfortable with using it.

What do you dislike?

Minor issues that seem simple to fix - e.g. you can move training questions to different intents but can't move entity values into different entities.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Get real user data, deploy quickly and often and make constant improvements. Plan for users asking questions that your assistant can't answer/isn't within its remit and make sure you have a fallback answer or signpost to somewhere useful.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Getting information at scale to people who need it when they need it. Our call centre is only open until 8pm, but using our virtual assistant means we can support people through the night too.

What do you like best?

Simple and intuitive approach for implementing a conversation chatbot, with extensive support of queries for automating the dialog flow.

What do you dislike?

Documentation for developing conversation applications uses terminology which appears a bit too technical in contrast with the simplicity of configuring the chatbot

Recommendations to others considering the product

Remember that you must already have an IBM Cloud account. To avoid frustration use the tutorial which gives good guidance on how to implement a simple conversation chatbot. If you encounter difficulties, IBM support will assist you to move forward.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Implement a virtual assistant to answer standard questions about the GDPR regulation process. This should avoid overloading the service desk as the date the regulation comes into effect.

What do you like best?

I like the ability to easily integrate 3rd party and on-platform services. The dashboard view is a helpful aggregator of those services. Assistant has what seems like its own markup language using literals etc... That is a cool feature.

What do you dislike?

I dislike when services sleep and they fall out of sync. This happens when in a Dev env on the lite plan. I also dislike the performance of the name entity which is currently in beta. It is only succesful 50% of the time, my thinking is that this is a staple and should be nailed by now.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

I like the clean UI, it makes a very complex thing like the conversation design look clean and simple, and does a pretty good job displaying the conversation logic.

What do you dislike?

- There are no content management features. Content writers are used to working in Content management tools. That aside, there are a number of critical features always required in content management, such as content categorisation, language models, translation setup / integrations. There are also no APIs to allow us to integrate with other content management tools. These are critical for scaling.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are using Watson chatbot to abate contacts coming into the contact center.

What do you like best?

Main good points are: The API documentation and the sample code provided, the intuitive user interface of Watson Assistant

What do you dislike?

The lack of versioning causes us alot of problems, it is also diffiuclt to see what new featurs are planned with Watson Assistant in the furture, for example multiple skills per assistant is apprarently due for release soon but we have no visibility of this, currently we are looking at building applications to manage multiple bots and are not sure whether to invest time in this

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

Watson Conversation Service is easy to use and provides an accurate response for simple questions given that 5 to 10 samples have been configured for the questions.

What do you dislike?

IBM took a lot of time to identify the right SMEs who can guide us in creating the right training model. Also, there were lot of discussions about leveraging other Watson services such as Discovery, etc, which weren't productive.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Competition seems to be getting ahead of IBM in Cognitive capabilities. So evaluate the product not just for present use cases, but also from future proofing perspective.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

It is user friendly and very easy to understand. I just took one training and afterwards it was so easy to use thanks to the usability of the tool. I really liked the way you can test your conversation very easy and the steps to do it are so clear.

What do you dislike?

I really don't dislike anything, every issue I used to have was solved with the UI improvement.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Provide Self service for the customers. It is very easy to automate some processes on the service that your clients are getting

What do you dislike?

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Built a customer experience driven chatbot for a large enterprise, public facing, which is receiving over 1k conversations per day. Strong take up by users, lower customer escalations, and reduction of comms to existing support channels. Great product.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

The getting started to catch all the information needed to book an appointment is very easy after the introduction of the slot feature. We were able to have a basic booking conversation after a short time.

What do you dislike?

The support for common German relative date phrases (like "uebermorgen") was difficult. It's difficult for customers to enter time frames instead of concrete times.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The use case enable a 24/7 possibility to book an appointment using natural language.

What do you like best?

This product is very easy to use and its easy to define entities and relationships. Using which the Tool is able to build the base on its own. In fact for demo purpose , a quick chat bot can be done in about 30 minutes

What do you dislike?

THere is nothing that I do not like about this product

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

IBM Watson Assistant is being used to leverage contact center dvelopement and it is our tool of choice

What do you like best?

The IBM Watson assistant gives you alot of power in building virtual assistants, whill making it very straightforward and easy to use. The learning capabilities are amazing. Whether you are looking create basic virtual assistant experiences or involved automated tasks, the solution has what you need.

What do you dislike?

Want more integration with other chat and messaging platforms

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Working to tie in all our support channels, while removing the friction from the customer support experience.

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